Often, during a public meeting, one will hear a public employee tell members of a council, board, or commission that an item to be considered is available as part of a packet of documents provided to each member of the public body meeting that night. It’s all casual and blithe: “It’s in your packet,” someone will say.
One should keep in mind that your packet means their packet. Documents that could easily be scanned and placed on line at a city or school district website only occasionally appear there.
We’re an advanced, sophisticated country, and local officials in a place like Whitewater, Wisconsin are oh-so-quick to proclaim, declare, announce, and incessantly celebrate their progress and advanced achievements. Somehow, those achievements don’t include consistently and timely placement online of official, pertinent public documents.
Why would that be?
Are public officials unaware of how to place documents online? No, they know how to use simple online technologies to copy, scan, and upload documents if they wish. More importantly, they have even more skilled employees working for them, and at their service to answer questions about how to achieve these simple tasks.
Are public officials too dim to use these technologies? That is, not merely unaware, but somehow incapable? Again, the answer is surely that they’re all capable. Public officials’ problems do not stem from being dim, because they’re not dim. They are, in the words of former President George W. Bush, “plenty smart.” It’s not intellect that holds them back.
Most people are very clever, and if it were not so, we would not have been able to build a great and beautiful republic across this continent. The average person is amazingly talented; deficiencies are not of intellect.
Is it too expensive to put documents online? Of course not — these men will spend money for all sorts of press releases, publications, ceremonies, and marketing efforts. Those efforts are far more expensive (and less useful) that simply scanning and uploading public documents used in public meetings held at public expense and conducted under Wisconsin law.
Is it too hard to collect these documents for timely placement on the web? Of course not — if people are able to keep an ordinary schedule and routine in a city or town. If, for example, a town of only fourteen thousand (with not that many meetings) finds this too hard, then the problem isn’t the volume of meetings; it’s the caliber of bureaucrats. If keeping deadlines for collection and uploading of documents is presently too hard for the heads of municipal departments, then Whitewater should spring for an alarm clock, hour glass, or sundial for each principal bureaucrat, so they can better keep track of time.
Are these documents just for insiders? I’m sure there are some of that ilk who would like to think so. It’s wrong of course. Public documents belong to the public. In any event, government is not instituted among people to help a few vain and needy officials feel important, special, etc. Those who wish to feel important, special, or sought after should form a rock band.
The consequence of the lack of records is a kind of test: will you request routine public documents through an open records request, or will you go without? A community that talks about “excellent customer service” would put the documents online, before related meetings, for citizen review.
That some officials would consider doing so either odd or too much work shows how far government, including my own local government, falls from standards of good and open government.